Reel Affirmations 2004

I WOULD LOVE to write a long, thoughtful dissertation on the intellectual pleasures of sitting through this program of shorts for which science-fiction and fantasy are a loose, common binder. But I don’t want to waste your time and my words.

That said, Tempting Fate () is an impenetrable Australian short involving a gay Tarot-card reader who somehow (I’m still not quite sure) ends up on the other side of his cards. Tomo () boasts the intriguing premise of an astronaut stranded with his effete, porn-crazed robot, but the movie’s grinding dullness reduces its thematic value to dust.

The French entry, Oedipe () , is the only film in this series that approaches even the notion of watchable. But this story of a mother trying to create a perfect, heterosexual son is ultimately done in by a narrative that is hard to follow and even harder to digest.

In the French short Paradisco () , a older gay man takes his young trick back in time to a 1970s party where everybody breaks out into a twelve-minute-long musical number celebrating the joys of disco. There may be a greater point to Paradisco — the losses suffered to AIDS — but it’s obliterated by the cloying, insipid song, which, by the way, is sung in bright and bubbly French. Les vomit.

And finally, adding insult to this mess is The Milkman () , a gratuitously sick joke involving a fetish-charged encounter between a grossly obese man and a wafer-thin waif. It’s a soured abomination of filmmaking that should have never been included.

Sci-Fi Fag Theater 2004

Randy Shulman is Metro Weekly's Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. He can be reached at rshulman@metroweekly.com.